After you read Julia Langbein’s Dear Monica Lewinsky (Doubleday, out now), it’s not surprising to find out that the author Langbein is also a comedian with a PhD in Art History.

Her novels are wacky, fantastical, and very smart. In American Mermaid, Langbein’s first foray into fiction in 2023, her protagonist Penny sells her blockbuster novel to Hollywood, but then she (and quite possibly—or impossibly—her mermaid, too) must battle to keep ownership of the story. Dear Monica Lewinsky, her second novel, also confronts the idea of who controls one’s personal narrative.

Jean is a chef whose life is a wreck after years of dealing with the toxic effects of a brief affair she had with a professor after her sophomore year in college. Desperate to reclaim her own version of herself, she prays to Monica Lewinsky, and…she answers. What follows is a laugh-out-loud story that pops with radiant originality while diving deep into issues of female desire, ambition, and selfhood.

Langbein spoke to PW, from the village outside Paris where she lives and works, about being inspired by saints and playing with comedy in her work.

The brilliant spoof that opens your new novel reads like a biographical entry in an encyclopedia of saints, in which St. Monica Lewinsky is portrayed not only as noble and strong, but finally “consecrated by the collective force of the American conscience during the second decade of the third millennium AD.”

When I used to do improv comedy, there was this one show where we would perform for 24 hours straight, which is bananas! We would bring material to keep us going. I was 19, and I brought with me Butler’s Lives of the Saints, which I had to read for a medieval [art history] course, and we would just take a life from it to improv off of. I’ve known for a long time that these stories are stranger than people think.

So did this St. Monica character come first in your imagination? Or did your protagonist Jean?

St. Monica, but I knew I needed a supplicant, so the two had to create each other. Monica already has her iconography, her meaning, her voice; she has her amplitude. She could lead me into the story [easier] than Jean, who’s much mushier and more human and more confused.

Jean prays to St. Monica to deliver her from her sad life after she receives a crippling email invitation from the older man who’d betrayed her, and remembers that their brief affair was in 1998, the same summer President Clinton admitted to his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

I finished this book in 2023 so I didn’t know that Monica Lewinsky was going to launch a podcast called Reclaimed, and her series of projects all around retelling stories and reclaiming narratives. It’s a total coincidence!

But all of us have said, what were we thinking? When you have that kind of mass reckoning, that is a really interesting terrain in which to place a story about personal and collective history.

This is Jean’s retelling, reshaping her own “saint’s” life. It’s this genre of the saints’—lives being told in this patriarchal way—which made me wonder about the real women behind it. Like, what woman thrilled to, what, being raped and then having her throat slit?

And then offering it all up to God, which is what saints and martyrs do.

American Mermaid was about how to protect yourself from being sold, being chopped up and sold. This book is more about the dangerous traps of storytelling. What I’m trying to understand is just how deep these tropes around female virtue are, these expectations that women be the supporting character, disposable, objects of desire but never desiring. It’s been incredibly hard to expunge the way women think of themselves, each other.

Do you use comedy as a weapon? Are you “getting at serious truths but also being a little bit ridiculous”?

My favorite novelists are comic novelists, and they’re people who, to me, have explained life better than anyone else.

The end of DML is very satisfying.

Writing the end of this book was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I had to go back and re-read Dickens, look at Dante again. I had to go back and really, really read the book myself, my own book. The end is of a piece with all those really weird saints’ lives. To me there’s nothing contrived or eccentric about what I do. It’s actually the end point of a logical analysis; it makes sense.